Albany House Business Centre

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Introduction

Albany House Business Centre, based in Wokingham, Berkshire, provides prestigious, high quality serviced office accommodation for small to medium-sized businesses. Housed in a Nineteenth Century Grade II listed building, Albany House offers twelve well appointed furnished office suites and an impressive oak-panelled conference room, which clients hire out for meetings.

“At Albany House we have combined the beauty of an early Victorian Town House with the latest technology and IT infrastructure. It took two years to completely refurbish the whole building from a derelict state and since 2000 we have been providing clients with the resources necessary to allow them to concentrate on their core business,” says Andy Gillen, Director of Albany House Business Centre.

Current Situation

In order to cater for even the most demanding of businesses, Albany House Business Centre invested heavily in telecoms and network cabling. One hundred and fifty data points were installed, linked by hundreds of metres of Cat5e cabling to a robust network hub housed in the building’s IT nerve centre. Using this fully wired network system, each company can create their own Local Area Network (LAN) so that they can share files, printers and Internet access between their PCs.

The sixteen person capacity conference room is also equipped with a data point enabling clients to access their own office server or the Internet from a PC or laptop during a meeting or presentation.

The Problem

Since installing the building’s structured cabling infrastructure, Andy Gillen has found that the fixed network has a number of limitations.

“Flexibility in IT resources is key for business centres and our problem is that when one of our clients wishes to hold a meeting in the conference room, specialist technical support is required to ensure they can access their LAN. It is not a simple thing to set up a patch to connect the data point in the conference room with their Server and if it fails, they can lose credibility – big deals happen in that conference room and if my clients can’t do a presentation because the patch has not been configured correctly, then it’s a problem,”

“We would also like our clients to be able to access the Internet using our high-speed Broadband connection from the conference room but we don’t want to have a PC permanently set up in the corner. This is because it would ruin the look and feel of the room and also is not really practical, as it is not convenient for a group of people to move from their seats to cluster around a monitor in the corner of the room in order to view a website – it would interrupt the flow of the meeting,” says Andy Gillen.

The Solution – a 22Mbps Wireless LAN from USRobotics

Andy Gillen has recently invested in a combination of products from USRobotics’ 22megabits per second (Mbps) Wireless Networking solution. These products have enabled him to create a wireless network enabling multiple PCs to securely share Internet access, files and printers. Designed for quick and easy installation, the solutions delivers double the transmission speed, greater range and vastly better security than existing 11 Mbps products and importantly provides backwards compatibility with 802.11b 11 Mbps solutions.

Using a USR8022 22Mbps Wireless Cable/DSL Router and a USR2210 PC card, Andy Gillen has set up his own office in Albany House with a wireless network and Internet gateway. This gives him access to his data files and high-speed Internet connection wirelessly from his laptop wherever he is in the building and freeing him from the restrictions of having to be at his desk. He is now able to move about Albany House showing prospective clients the facilities and if he needs any information from his data files he is able to access them immediately with out returning to his office. He has also invested in a second wireless access point and some extra PC cards so that he can make this solution available to his clients.

“Albany House is a large building and when I show people around it is impossible to keep running back and forth to my desktop PC,” continues Andy. “Now I am able to bring my laptop where ever I go in the building and all my files come with me. When I show prospective clients the conference room I am able to demonstrate accessing our LAN and our high-speed Internet connection both of which I can access from my laptop whist sitting at the boardroom table – it is impressive and obviously something that the businesses at Albany House want to be able to do themselves in their own meetings.”

Andy has also invested in a dummy laptop with permanent wireless access to the Internet for use in the conference room for any meetings, which require viewing web sites but not access to networked data files. This has overcome the problem of having an intrusive PC sitting in the corner of the room.

In-built security delivers peace of mind

Andy Gillen can be confident that both the data on his wireless network and his wireless Internet connection is safe from hackers. With in-built 256-bit encryption security and MAC address authentication, the USRobotics 22Mbps Wireless Networking solution ensures privacy and protects important data.

Conclusion

For Albany House, the USRobotics 22Mbps Wireless network solution has eliminated the need for technical support whenever the conference room is used and access to a private network or the Internet is needed. It also provides Andy Gillen the freedom to move from his own office suite into the conference room or another part of the building with just a laptop and still remain connected to his files.

“It’s great to be able to jump up from my desk, grab my laptop and start showing people around knowing that I can still get hold of anything I need from my files or the Internet whilst on the move. It is an extremely neat solution,” concludes Andy Gillen.

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